Eric Margolis
"There is simply no political benefit for the United States in invading Iraq. On the contrary, such an act of brazen aggression would summon up a host of unforeseen dangers and unimagined consequences that could destabilize the Mideast... and Turkey, create a world economic crisis, and, perhaps, cause the aggressive Bush administration to commit an act of imperial overreach that permanently injures America's geopolitical interests and, let us not forget, its moral integrity."

Senator Ted Kennedy
"... a case has not been made to connect Al Qaeda and Iraq... To the contrary, there is no clear and convincing pattern of Iraqi relations with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban."

Senator Barack Obama
"What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."

Michael Moore
"We have a fictitious president, who was put in office with fictitious results and he's now conducting a war for fictitious reasons."

Rep. Barbara Lee
"We have seen no evidence tying Iraq to the atrocities of September 11th..."

Senator Russ Feingold
"... as far as I can tell, the administration apparently intends to wing it when it comes to the day after or, as others have suggested, the decade after. And I think, Mr. President, that makes no sense at all."

Rep. Ron Paul
"All we hear about in the biased media is the need to eliminate Saddam Hussein, with little regard for how this, in itself, might totally destabilize the entire Middle East and Central Asia... It could, in fact, make the Iraq 'problem' much worse."

Al Gore
"[The Bush doctrine of preemption] means also that if the Congress approves the Iraq resolution just proposed by the administration it is simultaneously creating the precedent for preemptive action anywhere, anytime this or any future president so decides."

Pope John Paul II
"'NO TO WAR'! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity."

I wonder why the mass media isn't inviting any of these people (the ones who are still alive, at least) to discuss the outcome in Iraq? Oh, that's right. Our media was at the forefront of this failure, cheering us on to war.

Eric Margolis
"There is simply no political benefit for the United States in invading Iraq. On the contrary, such an act of brazen aggression would summon up a host of unforeseen dangers and unimagined consequences that could destabilize the Mideast... and Turkey, create a world economic crisis, and, perhaps, cause the aggressive Bush administration to commit an act of imperial overreach that permanently injures America's geopolitical interests and, let us not forget, its moral integrity."

Senator Ted Kennedy
"... a case has not been made to connect Al Qaeda and Iraq... To the contrary, there is no clear and convincing pattern of Iraqi relations with either Al Qaeda or the Taliban."

Senator Barack Obama
"What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."

Michael Moore
"We have a fictitious president, who was put in office with fictitious results and he's now conducting a war for fictitious reasons."

Rep. Barbara Lee
"We have seen no evidence tying Iraq to the atrocities of September 11th..."

Senator Russ Feingold
"... as far as I can tell, the administration apparently intends to wing it when it comes to the day after or, as others have suggested, the decade after. And I think, Mr. President, that makes no sense at all."

Rep. Ron Paul
"All we hear about in the biased media is the need to eliminate Saddam Hussein, with little regard for how this, in itself, might totally destabilize the entire Middle East and Central Asia... It could, in fact, make the Iraq 'problem' much worse."

Al Gore
"[The Bush doctrine of preemption] means also that if the Congress approves the Iraq resolution just proposed by the administration it is simultaneously creating the precedent for preemptive action anywhere, anytime this or any future president so decides."

Pope John Paul II
"'NO TO WAR'! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity."

I wonder why the mass media isn't inviting any of these people (the ones who are still alive, at least) to discuss the outcome in Iraq? Oh, that's right. Our media was at the forefront of this failure, cheering us on to war.

Rep. Barbara Lee gained national attention in 2001 as the only member of congress to vote "No" on the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF), stating that she voted no not because she opposed military action but because she believed the AUMF, as written, granted overly-broad powers to wage war to the president at a time when the facts regarding the situation were not yet clear. She "warned her colleagues to be 'careful not to embark on an open-ended war with neither an exit strategy nor a focused target.'"[11] Lee explained "It was a blank check to the president to attack anyone involved in the September 11 events—anywhere, in any country, without regard to our nation's long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without time limit. In granting these overly broad powers, the Congress failed its responsibility to understand the dimensions of its declaration.... The president has the constitutional authority to protect the nation from further attack and he has mobilized the armed forces to do just that. The Congress should have waited for the facts to be presented and then acted with fuller knowledge of the consequences of our action."

This hour we pull apart one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to the longest war in U.S. history. We examine how just 60 words of legal language have blurred the line between war and peace.

In the hours after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a lawyer sat down in front of a computer and started writing a legal justification for taking action against those responsible. The language that he drafted and that President George W. Bush signed into law - called the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) - has at its heart one single sentence, 60 words long. Over the last decade, those 60 words have become the legal foundation for the "war on terror."

In this collaboration with BuzzFeed, reporter Gregory Johnsen tells us the story of how this has come to be one of the most important, confusing, troubling sentences of the past 12 years. We go into the meetings that took place in the chaotic days just after 9/11, speak with Congresswoman Barbara Lee and former Congressman Ron Dellums about the vote on the AUMF. We hear from former White House and State Department lawyers John Bellinger & Harold Koh. We learn how this legal language unleashed Guantanamo, Navy Seal raids and drone strikes. And we speak with journalist Daniel Klaidman, legal expert Benjamin Wittes and Virginia Senator Tim Kaine about how these words came to be interpreted, and what they mean for the future of war and peace.

Dennis Kucinich should be on any list that is detailing people who were right about the war. He was always one of my favorite politicians. Unfortunately he was defeated in an election primary by a Democrat who said he was not liberal enough.

The Repukes got rid of Kucinich by gerrymandering his district in Ohio. In other words, they split it up and included more conservative neighborhoods in the new district. Then, they forced him to run against another Democrap. Kucinich was leveraged out.

This is one way the powers-that-be get rid of troublesome (meaning, truthful, honest and activist) representatives.

The Repukes got rid of Kucinich by gerrymandering his district in Ohio. In other words, they split it up and included more conservative neighborhoods in the new district. Then, they forced him to run against another Democrap. Kucinich was leveraged out.

This is one way the powers-that-be get rid of troublesome (meaning, truthful, honest and activist) representatives.

I did not know that, thanks. I thought he was a tremendous politician.

I'm not a big fan of Obama's, but his comment prior to the vote was right on the button; The invasion was due to pure, ideological bull****. Ron Paul's comments were also right on. Of course, rather than prosecute those who lied this country into war, Obama chose, once again, to sweep their crimes under the rug, just like he did with the derivatives piracy of Wall Street. He seems to make a habit of letting criminals off the hook. I guess it's the old Ford/Nixon logic: It would do the country more harm to air out our laundry. Of course, we didn't use that "logic" when Bubba was caught getting BJs in the Oval Office.

We should also remember that Brent Scowcroft and Generals Shelton and Zinni were opposed to the invasion. We also forget that Joseph Wilson was charges d'affaires for the U.S. government in Baghdad and resigned his position with the foreign service in protest, prior to being smeared by Cheney and having his CIA employed wife outed. And Wilson wasn't the only one. A number of senior diplomats resigned. Why didn't our media put any them on their TV shows over the last few weeks?

The following individuals also issued a statement opposed to the invasion of Iraq:

William J. Crowe, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Ronald Reagan
Joseph Hoar, former Commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East
H. Allen Holmes, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations
Donald McHenry, former Ambassador to the United Nations
Merrill McPeak, former Air Force Chief of Staff
Jack F. Matlock, Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and former Ambassador to the Soviet Union
John Reinhardt, former Director of the United States Information Agency
Ronald I. Spiers, Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Political Affairs and a former Ambassador
Stansfield Turner, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

Richard Clarke stated that the invasion of Iraq was exactly what OBL wanted. Turns out he was right on as well. The same statement was also made by Lt. Gen. William Odom, former Director of the National Security Agency. For a full record of the opposition, go here for all the people the Bush regime, and the national corporate media refused to listen to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Iraq_War

And Dennis Kucinich? He said, "Lies are a weapon of mass destruction."

And when a journalist asked him during the campaign, "Congressman Kucinich, I believe you're the only one here who voted against the PATRIOT act right away after 9/11. Why is that?"

Kucinich answered, "Because I read it."

America has chosen to bury it's head in the sand and pretend its history no longer holds any importance. We just move on, secure in the dream of our national nobility; A self-blinded people afraid to face the truth, or even look at it. And now, the media simply picks up on the mantra of "Blame Obama" for not only the outcome of the Iraq War, but for everything else as well. He has become our national scapegoat in order to absolve us of all of our sins.

Pretty much all of these people who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq, many of them military professionals turn out to have been right on the button about how it would all turn out. We ignored them then. We ignore them now. And we've learned nothing.

More info coming out about the "Italian Letter" that Cheney used to drive America into Iraq. This stuff should be criminal. Cheney et al should spend the rest of their days in prison. But that's not how America works. We forget our history as fast as we write it.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, which also received the report, apparently did not check the facts and produced an intelligence summary that landed on Cheney's desk on Feb. 12. He pounced on the report and ordered the intelligence community to go on a full-court press for more detail. By the fall the U.S. obtained virtually all the bogus documents from an Italian reporter, Elisabetta Burba, who had received them from a SISMI agent trying to sell them. Burba had wanted U.S. verification and reaction. Most of the documents had other factual errors and made little sense to U.S. experts.

But Bush and Cheney were seeking support for war and truth was not critical. Bush shocked many U.S. intelligence officials with the inclusion of 16 words in his Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

What U.S. intelligence officials and many in the administration knew was that Bush had omitted very important facts:

He didn't say, for instance, that America had the same bogus documents that had prompted the British claim; that the CIA had warned the British that the uranium intelligence was highly suspect and shouldn't be used in a public "dossier" Prime Minister Tony Blair was prepared to release; that former ambassador to Niger Joseph Wilson had returned to the country at the behest of the CIA, reporting back that no such uranium deal had ever transpired; that many U.S. officials who had reviewed the documents, including the State Department's nuclear weapons specialist, Simon Dodge, had spotted numerous factual errors in the phony papers. "The uranium purchase agreement," he e-mailed to colleagues in the intelligence community a week before Bush's speech, "probably is a forgery."

Yet the Bush and Cheney inner circle had already decided on war. Rallying public support was critical. No one wanted a repeat of the Vietnam War syndrome, a malaise that afflicted national morale for two decades. And they wanted no congressional resistance. To that end, in the late summer of 2002, the administration formed the so-called White House Iraq Group for the sole purpose of selling the war.

You have to admit, the media was largely complicit. That and all the nationalism related to 9/11. Along with the successful right wing propaganda campaign it was really a perfect storm that Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith/etc. played perfectly.

You have to admit, the media was largely complicit. That and all the nationalism related to 9/11. Along with the successful right wing propaganda campaign it was really a perfect storm that Cheney/Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith/etc. played perfectly.

Not saying they didn't play a part,a significant part,but by no means excuses the GWB admin.

The same foreign policy “experts” who lied us into the Iraq war are now telling us we must re-invade Iraq to deal with the disaster caused by their invasion! They cannot admit they were wrong about the invasion being a “cakewalk” that would pay for itself, so they want to blame last week’s events on the 2011 US withdrawal from Iraq. But the trouble started with the 2003 invasion itself, not the 2011 troop withdrawal. Anyone who understands cause and effect should understand this.

The Obama administration has said no option except for ground troops is off the table to help the Iraqi government in this crisis. We should not forget, however, that the administration does not consider Special Forces or the CIA to be “boots on the ground.” So we may well see Americans fighting in Iraq again.

It is also likely that the administration will begin shipping more weapons and other military equipment to the Iraqi army, in the hopes that they might be able to address the ISIS invasion themselves. After years of US training, costing as much as $20 billion, it is unlikely the Iraqi army is up to the task. Judging from the performance of the Iraqi military as the ISIS attacked, much of that money was wasted or stolen.

A big US government weapons transfer to Iraq will no doubt be favored by the US military-industrial complex, which stands to profit further from the Iraq meltdown. This move will also be favored by those in Washington who realize how politically unpopular a third US invasion of Iraq would be at home, but who want to “do something” in the face of the crisis. Shipping weapons may be an action short of war, but it usually leads to war. And as we have already seen in Iraq and Syria, very often these weapons fall into the hands of the al-Qaeda we are supposed to be fighting!

Because of the government’s foolish policy of foreign interventionism, the US is faced with two equally stupid choices: either pour in resources to prop up an Iraqi government that is a close ally with Iran, or throw our support in with al-Qaida in Iraq (as we have done in Syria). I say we must follow a third choice: ally with the American people and spend not one more dollar or one more life attempting to re-make the Middle East. Haven’t we already done enough damage?

I remember watching the news shows and listening to Bush and Cheney and any other within his circle on why Hussien must go. It seemed so canned and planted. I never believed it for one bit. I also remember when Bush was stating they were hiding illegal gas warheads and showed two of them. They looked like they have been buried since the Iran-Iraq war and didn't have anything in them but just the shell. That is what really made my mind up that Bush is stretching the reasons. This is all from one conservative voter.

I see the Demos here puffing their chests, but let's remember how flawed American intervention in Iraq was under Clinton.

His policy was even more useless.

More useless than Bush's? By what criteria? Deaths? Injuries? Money?

The entire philosophy of intervention is useless. This has been proven without a doubt over and over and over again. But I guarantee you one thing, the next president, whoever that may be, will invade somewhere. They all do. I have realized that, I don't know if it's all human beings or just Americans, but we are incapable of learning from history.

The entire philosophy of intervention is useless. This has been proven without a doubt over and over and over again. But I guarantee you one thing, the next president, whoever that may be, will invade somewhere. They all do. I have realized that, I don't know if it's all human beings or just Americans, but we are incapable of learning from history.

The entire philosophy of intervention is useless. This has been proven without a doubt over and over and over again. But I guarantee you one thing, the next president, whoever that may be, will invade somewhere. They all do. I have realized that, I don't know if it's all human beings or just Americans, but we are incapable of learning from history.

Does this represent a change of heart?

You have a long record of cheering US foreign invasions, bombing, etc.